Elon Musk: Twitter Blue is on me! Celebs: You shouldn’t have.

There’s an old observation—or at least something my mother used to repeat—that says the rich stay rich because they don’t have to pay for anything. A very weird case in point is what’s going on with some celebrities and Twitter verification. We’ve now reached a new threshold for notoriety: are you famous enough that Elon Musk will cover your eight bucks-per-month tab for the once-coveted blue tick?

As was confirmed by the South African-born 51-year-old billionaire-spaceman and one-time “Saturday Night Live” host himself, Musk has offered a few people access to Twitter Blue gratis. Twitter Blue not only verifies that you are who you say you are (or, at least, who you were when you put in your credit card information and confirmed via text message) but allows users to edit their tweets after they fire them off (no more “covefe”), embed videos of any length, and lots of other things, too. (Maybe make your Tesla read your tweets in the KITT voice someday?)

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Musk said that he is personally paying for LeBron James and, it would appear, Stephen King to have this access. Is it because he’s just mad for the Los Angeles Lakers and the macabre tales from Castle Rock? Well, maybe not. Both of these superstars had previously mocked the idea of shelling out any coin for verification, so it would not be outside of Musk’s typical manner to “get them” in this way, making them look like hypocrites. (Keep in mind that any press outlet that reaches out to Twitter gets an auto-response of the “poop” emoji.)

King, for his part, strongly denied he paid for Twitter Blue:

The idea of making blue ticks available to anyone who pays has been seen as detrimental to the service—the whole point was to insure that if someone who was, say, a foreign correspondent for Reuters reporting on unrest from Khartoum (as is happening right now) was actually someone with that built-in level of credibility, and not some random person jacked on Twinkies and methamphetamines who plays “God of War” 18 hours a day. 

The Hollywood Reporter has noted that William Shatner and Ice-T, two additional household names who chided Musk’s announced changes, retain their blue status, but it is unclear if this is because Musk put them on his account or not. (Shatner probably annoys Musk the most, because it was rival Jeff Bezos who got to send Captain Kirk up to space, and not him.)

Oh, and we checked: Grimes still has still got the blue tick, too. That’s sweet? Hard to know with those two.

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